The recent wave of power outages that hit parts of the Midwest, Northeast and eastern Canada last month offer a stark reminder that there is a need for electric grid operators such as the Midwest Independent Transmission System Operator (MISO) to serve as electric “traffic controller(s)” in the management of power flows over the country’s transmission lines, FERC Chairman Pat Wood said last week.

“I’ve been flying out of airports the last couple of days and I always look at that [air traffic control] tower and think, ‘OK, that’s what MISO should be about. MISO should be that guy in the tower that schedules Delta landing and American and Continental and the little commuter jets,” Wood said in an appearance before an Electric Power Supply Association (EPSA) board of directors meeting in Arlington, VA.

“That is exactly the function that is so important [that] I think we’re seeing as the blackout stories come out. That there’s a real, meaningful role of [an] air traffic controller function in this industry, particularly if you have multiple owners of generation.”

In commenting on the historic outages, Wood said that “every cloud has a silver lining,” while also acknowledging that the “clouds are dark.” He believes the events of Aug. 14 “have brought to the forefront what has really been an inside-the-beltway, behind the scenes discussion” related to electric power policy.

“It’s tempting, as I think for a number of you and for even me and others across the spectrum, to jump in and advocate our own kind of interests in this bad occurrence,” Wood said. “But I’m going to resist the urge to kind of say, ‘Well, blackout equals standard market design.’ I do think it’s important to let the facts drive us where we go.” When all is said and done, an ongoing joint U.S.-Canadian probe of the blackouts could determine the outages resulted from human errors, the FERC chairman said.

The North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) recently offered a cautious conclusion that the string of power outages probably began in northern Ohio, but it has refused to lay the blame on a single utility.

However, Akron, OH-based FirstEnergy Corp., which owns seven utilities in Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, has come under increasing scrutiny after three of its transmission lines and one line it jointly owns with American Electric Power in northern Ohio tripped out of service prior to the outages. FirstEnergy’s Ohio Edison utility is being named as a possible culprit for the eight-state blackout.

MISO, which monitors the reliability of lines in 15 states and a Canadian province, has said that it was in communications with other control area operators in northern Ohio and a neighboring region about the status of the tripped transmission lines before the blackouts spread throughout the Eastern Interconnection.

Meanwhile, Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham on Wednesday updated the status of the ongoing probe into the blackout in an appearance with NERC officials in Princeton, NJ.

“It’s a complex job we are undertaking,” Abraham said in reference to the need for investigators to gather and analyze all of the information tied to the blackout. “To put that into perspective, the area affected by the blackout included 34,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines and hundreds of power generating units, all of which went out of service in a period of about nine seconds.”

He said that during those nine seconds, “thousands of events occurred over this vast network of power plants, transmission lines, switching stations and control centers that could have had some role in the blackout.” Abraham said that it’s “going to take some time to compile all this information, get it all synchronized and sequenced, and then determine exactly what happened when — and how it’s all interrelated.”

“Such a complex undertaking is going to take some time — weeks, not days, certainly,” Abraham noted. “But, hopefully, not months. We are determined to finish this investigation in a timely manner, but we will not compromise quality for speed. As I’ve indicated, we will follow the facts wherever they lead us. We won’t jump to conclusions. Our investigation will be thorough and objective.”

Abraham later in the week issued an order requiring that the 330 MW, underwater Cross Sound Cable transmission line stretching between Connecticut and Long Island remain available for use indefinitely. He said that an electric power-related emergency continues to exist in the northeastern part of the U.S. in the wake of the blackout.

The DOE Secretary said that the continued operation of the cable “is necessary and desirable” to effectively address the situation that exists in the Northeast. The order will remain in effect until such time as Abraham issues a subsequent order finding that the emergency no longer exists.

Elsewhere, fallout from the blackout continued in Washington, DC, last week after two prominent consumer groups said that federal lawmakers should pare back a proposed electricity title included in a broader energy bill to a reliability-only title.

“Congress should take action to prevent the real problem — more blackouts, rather than use the blackout as an excuse to push its deregulatory agenda,” said the Consumers Union and the Consumer Federation of America said in a report released last week.

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